I. Revisioning
I recently published my debut novel, The Book of Losman, at age forty-nine. Like every writer, my past is cluttered with unpublished manuscripts, thousands of pages. Along the path to this moment, I’ve worked a succession of full-time jobs at various nonprofits and translated more than a dozen novels from Danish or Norwegian. That means I’ve spent a lot of time toiling in the recesses of language, learning how to use it. I don’t regret anything, including all the rejections. Everything I’ve read, everything I’ve written, has shaped who I’ve become. This is true for everyone, but especially for writers.
At the beginning of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (ca. 1321), one of the most influential works of literature in the Western canon, the pilgrim Dante—the author’s fictional double—meets the Roman poet Virgil, who guides him through hell and much of purgatory. Though Virgil lived more than a thousand years before Dante, his work had a profound impact on him, and it’s hardly a surprise that he would serve as the later poet’s muse and “teacher.” Dante Alighieri utilizes Virgil’s perceived wisdom to enlighten the pilgrim Dante and, in turn, the listener or reader.
This wise-man guide motif is a time-honored fixture in storytelling. Six hundred sixty-eight years later, in 1989, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure makes solid use of it when Rufus (George Carlin) takes Bill and Ted (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) into a time-traveling phone booth to meet all sorts of historical figures who, yes, bodaciously enlighten Bill and Ted about the history of the world.
Writers, poets, songwriters, filmmakers—artists in all media—often use older work to frame and contextualize their art. In this way, they are in dialogue with one another across time and space. As social mores and conditions change, the literary works that describe society change with them. Take Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1966 prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), told from the point of view of Antoinette Cosway, Mr. Rochester’s Creole wife. Sena Jeter Naslund’s 1999 novel Ahab’s Wife also positions the narrative from the perspective of a female character. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s 1851 classic, the monomaniacal sea captain’s unnamed wife plays a bit part; in Jeter Naslund’s novel, she reemerges as Una Spenser, the heart and soul of a sprawling narrative. Nancy Rawles’s novel My Jim (2005) tells the story of another unnamed, barely mentioned female character in a famous novel: the wife of Jim from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whom she names Sadie.
By breathing life into nominal characters in classic novels for twentieth-century readers, Rhys, Jeter Naslund, and Rawles offer trenchant commentary on the role of women, including Black women, in a modern society.
Retellings (or revisionings) are powerful vehicles for exactly this kind of commentary, and though they are hardly a new species of literature, the growing bulk of material available to writers today makes this a particularly exciting age for them. A short and certainly inexhaustive list includes Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel A Thousand Acres (King Lear), Alice Randall’s 2001 novel The Wind Done Gone (Gone with the Wind), Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella The Penelopiad (The Odyssey), Matt Haig’s 2006 novel The Dead Fathers Club (Hamlet), Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 novel Demon Copperhead (David Copperfield), and in 2024, Percival Everett’s National Book Award–winning James (another revisioning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). All these works provide fresh takes on much older stories. In Everett’s case, like Rawles, he revisions a character who got only a partial treatment in the original. No matter how noble Twain’s criticism of the institution of slavery was, many critics believe his version of Jim ultimately resorted to caricature, designed to elicit laughs from white readers. As a result, Jim has inspired a considerable amount of hand-wringing since he first appeared in print in 1884. In Everett’s retelling, however, Jim is a fully-fledged and remarkable character with a rich inner life. You might say that Everett wrests Jim’s narrative away from Twain, but that he also names Jim’s wife Sadie seems a nod to Nancy Rawles.
Given the United States’ dark history of racism, versions of Huck Finn told from either Sadie’s point of view or Jim’s, as written by Black authors, seem like critically important and much-needed additions to America’s dialogue about race. Black writing has its own tradition, of course, but these retellings both expand and recast the canon of American literature.